why I hit my mother in the head (she passed the test)

A couple of weeks ago my feed was flooded with vibey videos about “the painter that mastered sunsets”. it’s not just my algorithm: even his own posts have a lot of traction.

Nagai visited the united states for a 40-day holiday in 1973. he drove around the pacific coast, talked to hippies, learned to surf.
it was the 4th of july and the 17th day of his trip. he was staying at a friend’s place in carmel for a weekend. his hosts were a liberal couple who had moved from upstate new york to live in california, and in the hallway to his room they had an original david hockney. Nagai was dazzled, and searched for galleries where he could see more of hockney’s work and study it. all of this is made up. but I like to believe it’s what happened.

in the fifteen-second attention span I dedicated to each reel before flicking my thumb I saw this perfect sunset americana scenery: glistening water. shiny cars. waves. magenta sky that is the theme of the 80s revival vaporwave core. the saturated colors flush my eyeballs and I grant the reel an extra 10 seconds of attention.

and here’s what crosses my mind: there is something so inhuman about the composition of the picture, even though everything that I stare at individually seems fine. and I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

when I go to a museum I like to imagine myself living inside the painting. the pool is immaculate. the ocean shimmering and a breeze of a cool pacific summer day. the lawn chairs are inviting. but they’re inviting me. no, no, I have one too many blemishes for this spotless world. the textureless surfaces under the bright and omnipresent sun will expose all of my wrinkles, scoliosis, and the pilling on my tshirt.

I look at a pool scene and it gives me the same reaction of seeing a sterile operating room with bright white lights flooding every nook of the table. there’s nowhere to hide.

the houses are perfectly square. the grass is lush and the sky an endless pristine blue. I’d have to be flattened to my polished instagram version to dangle around that pool without looking like the wretched image of dorian gray, as an imperfect human (that is, all humans) would look if we transplanted them into that world.

when I look at it I imagine myself getting flattened to two dimensions and being stuck in a never-ending depthless world. an obvious version of bruno defined by its most basic features. brazilian-italian. black hair. has a surfboard. sips on a cocktail. and nothing else.

I have a vivid recollection of the first nasty nightmare (that I can remember of) in my life. I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I was living my normal child life in a small town in rural brazil, goofing around in school waiting for someone to pick me up. some days my dad, others mom. on special days my grandma and we’d have chinese for lunch. the half hour between the last sit-down activity and an adult picking you up was free time: the teachers, exhausted from their day, left the kids to fend for themselves. it was a lord of the flies type of experiment. my teacher in particular sits at a corner table. she has a stretched smile more horizontal than it should and eyes that even though it was a sunny brazilian spring did not glisten with the light. I asked if she was really ms theresa, and she kept insisting yes, I am, what are you talking about, giggling and half puffing “where is this coming from little boy”.

I locked my eyes on her trying to get her to look back to me and save me from a makeshift judo competition (I was a frail boy). she would look back but her eyes would not glisten. there was not that shimmer that tells you someone is looking straight back at you. I felt goosebumps running up my arms. but the other kids were all over the playground running screaming laughing and that was it. it was friday. as any other friday. I reached out for one of the kids but they were just too entertained to hear me speaking about the teacher looking like a madame tussauds unit.

I see grandma’s face show up with her salon perm. my god it is the best day ever. we’re getting chinese. I run towards her and she picks me up. I stare at her and her eyes also don’t shine back. I’m close to her face and I ask her “what’s wrong with your eyes they’re so dark today” and she pretended she didn’t listen. I move to my grandpa’s chair at the restaurant. I look up: same dead eyes. I panic. everything is fake. I’m living in a doppelganger world where everyone has no soul.

cut to another scene: I’m in a family setting, walking around, everyone has the same taxidermy eyes. my grandma picks me up. let me go. I hit her in the head. as I hit, a tray opens in her forehead with the mechanism of an old tape deck and the tray reveals a cassette tape that I pull out. fake grandma freezes, and I start hitting everyone’s head. no one seems to care. no one chases me and no one ever tried to harm me. in fact, nothing was different. it was a normal world except that everyone was walking around with no soul but with predefined instructions to behave as if.

great grandma arrives. she has no eerie look. I feel safe. she picks me up. I accidentally hit her head, a tray opens. fuck off. I scream in anger, she was my last hope. I scream and no sound comes out. I scream harder. I wake up screaming. real mom picks me up. I hit her head just to be sure. she was real.

there was absolutely nothing wrong in this nightmare except that all people were simulated. no one even tried to punish me for pulling out the cassette tapes and leaving out frozen statues.

these paintings give me the same feeling as the nightmare. a dead form with no soul. the pool chairs are an endless friday at the chinese restaurant in which you are completely alone and nothing will ever happen.

it’s not all that bad. the optimism. the colors. the naïveté as if it was drawn by a young boy that’s just adding the things he likes to a picture: sun, the ocean, a car and my two surfboards. one of them is for a best friend or a girlfriend. perfect teenage summer.

and I recognize Hiroshi captured so well the feeling of being out on the pacific coast barbecuing with full paraphernalia while your oversized truck sits in the driveway and you have five friends over with a family-sized 48-pack of patties and more beer than you could ever imagine downing on a saturday.

I too felt the same the first time I visited san francisco. Nagai landed in america in peak american dream years and spent the next fifty years oiling canvases not from sight but from fondness. good memories from a world of simple pleasures, like a day at the beach, hanging around with neighbors, watching a sunset. the wealth of america in the 1970s was not banquets but being a 16yo with a car, time to kill, and a surfboard underneath your armpit.

I always considered the quote “california is god’s gift to the world” and the whole “go west” obsession to be overstated until I hugged my first sequoia. until I saw the sunset at big sur, and gazed over a foggy san francisco afternoon overlooking the golden gate bridge. there is a gleam of hope and optimism in the water that I have yet to taste anywhere else in the world. and for this Hiroshi’s work is perfect.

Hiroshi is not the first artist being rediscovered on instagram reels (I refuse to download tiktok because that thing is like crack to me). alongside him I’ve seen many postwar names and even victorian age illustrators, and I’m going for an overarching conclusion connecting all of it.

the common thread: well defined subjects. sometimes saturated colors. a collection of works that all follow the same patterns (you could even say they share a vibe). they’re all figurative and describing a specific place or thing without creating any story around it. a landscape focus instead of scenes.

all of these are really well suited to be absorbed in the five second attention span before I click like and flick my thumb (fifteen if I’m feeling generous). this is art that is being pushed by the algorithm precisely because it is so easy to be consumed. many years ago I was curious about what exactly was foie gras, and thanks to youtube I was able to make up my mind to never eat it. it’s an engorged liver from an overfed duck. through a process called gavage a farmer shoves corn down a duck’s throat with a funnel. I don’t think we’re that different from ducks when it comes to our media consumption.

I’d never call Hiroshi or the great illustrators that traveled the world slop. all of this is truly art. but we see how much they share aesthetics with things that are indeed slop like vaporwave and those “see how was paris back in 1800s” ai-generated videos. there’s a corner of art which behaves like slop. it shares the lack of depth and easy-to-consume features. sometimes that was the actual point. illustrators would go around the world pre-camera to actually put things straight in your face. that was their job. in Nagai’s case, I’d argue that it is about the opulence. abundance.

in both cases, there’s no depth to it. there’s no scene. no story, not a single arc or development. the world is static, flat, and it captures a flash frozen vibe meant to be packaged, distributed and consumed in the same way as a freeze dried mango: extremely sugary, addictive, and successfully branding itself as a healthy option. eating freeze dried mangos is the spiritual equivalent of consuming art on instagram. it’s a vibe. saturated flavors. no depth. flat.

I let the reel loop and run once again. I stare at the ocean and yeah, there’s no glisten here. thumb flick.